NASLite Network Attached Storage

We're planning on building several 16 x 2tb NAS/RAID6 storage arrays. We'd like to use NASLite to manage the system. Can anyone make any suggestions as to what kind of hardware we should use? Specifically for the RAID controllers and possibly motherboards/CPU that will offer the best compatibility and performance. I have been looking at doing a couple LSI/3ware 8i cards in each system but just wanted to be sure I get the right thing and don't waste thousands of dollars and hours of tinkering

Is this a loaded question?

I would need a few more questions answered before I would be able to give a more concrete answer to you.

First off, what is the application/s you are planning on using this to serve as a storage back end for?

What kind of reliability are you looking for?

Are you going to be backing up to another medium or rely on the array/s and RAID6 only for data protection?

Are you looking to have the system/s expandable?

What kind of throughput are you looking for to the client/s in MB/sec concurrent?

What kind of a budget are you talking about?

Do you have any idea of what you are doing with a SAN/NAS system of this scale?

The reason I ask these questions is simple. You may end up spending literally thousands of dollars on these only to find that you have bought your way into a corner with no migration path that won't cause you major pain and cost big money. I will leave it at that for now.

Mike

Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the lack of details, should have been more thorough in my original question.

This is going to be primarily for storage/safe-keeping of data, mostly multimedia files. Throughput isn't terribly important. But it will be connected to a gigabit network and it would be nice to take advantage of that speed. We need something that is going to be very reliable. We wanted to go with a RAID array so that a drive failure wouldn't result in the loss of irreplaceable work. There will be no other backup, this will be the primary storage. Expansion is not a big deal as we can just build more boxes as the need for more storage arises. However, if there were a more cost effective way to add storage to one large array later on, I would certainly be interested, but it's not mandatory. I figured a system of this size would probably cost $5-$10k just in hardware but I've never built anything of this scale before. Basically we just need a replacement for backing up data to external USB drives. It's only going to be a couple computers dumping data to it over the network, so we're not talking about anything super fancy here. We basically just need the equivalent of an extremely large external USB drive, but with better reliability.

Any recommendations or feedback you can provide is greatly appreciated.

If you plan on not having some sort of backup then I will tell you that you may loose data at some point. Though RAID will give you some measure of protection from the loss of data due to a drive failure there is a trade off. That is that your chances of a failure multiply with the number of drives in that array. IE: If an array is made up of 10 drives that have an MTBF of 600,000 hours each, the actual MTBF of the array now is 60,000 hours. Add in the MTBF of the controller and the other parts and failure is almost a certain thing sooner or later. Did I mention that you really should be buying drives of the same type and model but from different lots? This can have a large effect on the MTBF of your array. What I am getting at here is that if the data is irreplaceable then you better be thinking about RAID6 and a mirror to another array with incremental backups at regular intervals.

That said, you can find most all of what you need on Ebay. I would recommend a server with at least two 8X PCIe slots, preferably more so you can add cards as needed to expand each array. The better controllers have battery backup for the write cache on the card, this will be a must for you. Also consider that some of the better cards also support SATA port expanders. These allow four drives to be addressed by one of the SATA channels on the controller. IE; In theory you could have a 24 port SATA RAID card with up to 96 drives off of it. Performance would not be to bad but you don't really care much about that. There are cases out there that will hold allot of drives, it just comes down to how much you are willing to spend for this. The other option is to simply add controllers and drives as needed up to the limit of the MB.

The area you are venturing into is fought with pitfalls and there are always issues to be dealt with. Some times they are very technical and one must ask ones self how much learning are you will to do. A poorly implemented infrastructure can be a constant cause of problems.

Mike

Thanks for the info. This is very helpful. I get what you're saying about the reliability even with RAID6. Does NASLite have the ability to do an automatic sync to another RAID array if we were to build two identical boxes, for example?

So the RAID hardware I'm looking at is the 3ware 9650SE-16ML. This seems like it does everything you've mentioned. It's PCIE x8 and has the battery backup option and 16 ports so we should be able to connect all 16 drives to one card. By utilizing 16 2tb drives in RAID6, I believe this should provide about 26tb of storage. This would probably be plenty for quite a while as we currently have about 10tb of data from the past 5 years and we expect to use the same over the next 5 years.

Thanks again!

Hi.

NASlite only does Mirror backups: you have identical copies of your TBs. It does NOT have an incremental backup system. I HAS the ability to mirror to another NASlite box. This is done very fast (except the first mirror of course) and very reliably.

I'll let Mike answer the oher more technical questions

I remember when my machine had a 1GB Fast Wide SCSI drive and that was allot of storage. While 26TB may seem like allot, it isn't. If you start to rip and archive Bluray disks you can be sure to rip through that much storage in short order. The average movie is between 2GB and 4GB depending. Add photos from the present crop of cameras, mine is a 14.7MP and it averages 4-7MB per photo. It all adds up, sometimes very fast.

My personal preference is a SAN based on a fibre channel hardware RAID system, hard to configure but fast and reliable. Many ways to skin a cat there are.

Mike

I hear ya. Since the data on the array probably won't be accessed much at all after it's stored, I feel pretty good about a standard SAS/SATA RAID array. We may even shut off the entire system for months at a time until someone needs to find something on there.

My only concern now is whether or not NASLite will support the RAID card and drive configuration I want to use. Do you know if I will have any trouble with the 3ware 9650SE-16ML card and 16 2tb drives on NASLite?

NASLite-2 supports the raid card.

16 TB is the max filesystem size.

Ah, good to know. So we could create two RAID 6 arrays of about 11tb each tho right?

Is the 16tb max a limitation of NASLite or the operating system or something else?

Linux ext3 filesystem max